Particle systems have been studied all the time, and have been widely used in various industrial fields such as food control, chemistry, civil engineering, oil and gas, mining, pharmaceutics, powder metallurgy, and energy. In the aspect of theoretical research, issues like avalanche are studied by exploring how to achieve the densest accumulation, or in which condition a sand heap may collapse. To study relevant particle systems, people have to construct large-sized particle systems in experiments. This is time-consuming and laborious. Further, some particle systems cannot be constructed in experiments because they are very expensive or need to operate in some extreme conditions. These problems do not exist with stimulated systems based on virtual experiment.
Currently, DEM (Discrete Element Method) is a mainstream method among computation methods for stimulating particle systems. The DEM method is a numerical computation method for substance system analysis following the method of finite element, and computational fluid mechanics (CFD). The DEM method stimulates and analyzes particle behaviors by establishing a parametric model of an infinitesimal architecture, and provides a platform for addressing various issues relating to, for example, particle, structure, fluid, electromagnetic and coupling thereof. The DEM method has become a powerful tool for scientific process analysis, product design optimization and development. In addition to application in scientific research, the DEM method has now become mature in science and technology applications and industrial fields, and extended from scientific applications like particle substance research, soil and rock engineering, and geological engineering to design and development of industrial processes and products, leading to importance achievements in many fields.
The DEM method is characterized by high accuracy of simulation and large amount of computation. Currently, the DEM method is implemented mainly in CPU. However, due to inadequate computation power of CPU, computation scale is insufficient, and only small space and time dimensions can be computed in an acceptable length of time. Further, the construction cost is extremely high because it is necessary to construct a large-scale or super large-scale CPU cluster of computers. This will consume a huge amount of power, and incur extremely high cost of use and maintenance. Current DEM method implemented with CPU can be applied only in certain situations, such as a small number of particles or collision between low-density particle, and cannot be used in simulation of collision between large-number, high-density particles.
The technology of using GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) for general-purpose computations has become more sophisticated. GPUs by two graphics adapter manufactures, nVIDIA and AMD support general-purpose computations. In view of the foregoing problems, the inventors of the present invention propose GPU-based particle flow simulation system and method.